Brilliant! Tragic!

The playful, whipsmart UK band returns, this time with leader Eddie Argos trying his hand at some actual singing.

All right, whose brilliant (i.e., tragic) idea was it for Eddie Argos to start singing? Was it producer Frank Black? Argos himself? Jasper "the Dolphin" Future? Did anybody actually think the problem with Art Brut was all the talking? I rather thought that was like the whole point. Granted, you either love the talking-singing thing or you hate it (see also: the Hold Steady), but at least it was their thing. And beyond being totally, instantly recognizable, it wasn't all that bad of a look for Art Brut, either: Argos' witty, conversational lyrics were always well served by his spoken delivery, offset by the band's playfully slick rock session band chops. But now Argos has gone from ranting about halting a make-out session to turn up a pop song, to singing (scarcely), "I want to be played in the background while couples drink their wine/ That would be a triumph with a voice like mine/ Everybody wants to feel sexy sometimes/ I can make it happen with a voice like mine."

Well, at least he hasn't lost his wry sense of humor. But about this newfound singing business: Argos has discovered a voice that sounds a bit like Jarvis Cocker's, only if he'd lost it after a long night out drinking-- a little hoarse, whispering low so as not to upset the hangover. So the album opens with what might as well be its mission statement, "Clever Clever Jazz", a typically dry-humored song about a band punching above its weight: "Sorry that it doesn't sound like it's planned... can't you see we're doing the best that we can?" Next is another entry into the band's "Weekend" trilogy (now extended, Douglas Adams-like, to four songs if you count B-side "Really Bad Weekend"), "Lost Weekend", and while it's as clever and sweet as any of its predecessors, Argos' intonation doesn't exactly do it any extra favors.

Some songs work fine with the singing: The above-quoted ballad "Sexy Sometimes" succeeds by dint of making Argos' very struggle the subject of its gently plodding fun, as does "Is Dog Eared" to some degree. And then halfway through the album, it seems like even Argos has started to think all this is a bad idea, reverting back for the remainder to his old patterns of speech and shouting.

The results are, unsurprisingly, some of the album's strongest songs, largely because Argos just gets out of the way of his own lyrics. "Martin Kemp Welch Five A-Side Football Rules!" is a scorcher, covering the familiar Art Brut territories of football and unrequited schoolboy crushes. "Axel Rose" raucously praises its subject as being the sort of guy you'd want in your corner when giving the world the finger. Maybe best of this side is "Sealand", ending the album on a drifting note, a dream of starting a sovereign nation of two at sea that affectingly flips the motto of It's a Bit Complicated standout "People in Love": "People in love lie around and get fat/ I didn't want us to end up like that."

In all this talk about talking, the band Argos originally hired through an ad in the back pages of the NME gets short shrift. But trust that they still sound very much like a band hired from the back pages of the NME: competent rock hands with equal flair for squealing guitar solos and pop backing vocals, easy showmen but not exactly showy. Basically, they punch their weight, and they do it quite well-- sorry to say, but their frontman-turned-singer might want to follow their example.